Time and Pitch are fundamental components of music. Rhythm is concerned with the relative duration of pitch and silence events in time. In fact, the quality of a music performance is largely judged by how well a performer or group of performers keep the time. In music compositions, time is divided into intervals that the musician follows when playing music notes. The closer the onset of the notes to the beginning of a time interval, or to a subdivision thereof, the more agreeable the music sounds to the human ear. In order to learn to keep time, musicians use a time keeping device, such as a metronome while playing music. With practice, skilled performers are able to play notes in relative timing with each metronome tick. However, in other cases the performer may keep an average time over the length of a performance, whereas the notes may individually deviate from each expected ideal tick, this is known as rubato. The human ear is sensitive to even small deviations in time and is able to judge the quality of the performance due to these deviations.
Modern digital data processing applications offer tools to correct or enhance audio data. These applications are capable of reducing background noise, enhancing stereo effects, adding or removing echo effects or performing other such enhancements to the audio data. However, these existing applications do not provide a mechanism for correcting inaccurate rhythm events in the audio data. Because of this and other limitations inherent in the prior art, there is a need for a process that can reduce rhythmic deviations in audio data.